WE SHOULD ELIMINATE POINTLESS SUFFERING

On John Stuart Mill and the Paradox of Utilitarianism

It was granted me to derive from that evil my own greatest good.

J. S. MILL

According to William Carlos Williams, "The pure products of America go crazy." Let's modify that observation slightly: "The pure products of modernity go crazy." In the fall of 1826, one such pure product, a twenty-year-old by the name of John Stuart Mill, sank into a suicidal depression.

James Mill, John Stuart's father, was devoted to modernity. Dismissing religion as superstition, he gravitated to the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham. James Mill believed that he understood human nature well enough to redesign education from the ground up. Under his rigorous tutelage, his son was proficient in ancient Greek by the age of five; by the age of nine, little John Stuart was reading Latin fluently and making sense of the highest levels of algebra. He celebrated his eleventh year by writing a history of Roman law. When he was fifteen (this would have been when my reading level topped out at X-Men comics, and my great scientific quandary was puzzling out how a bra is unfastened), J. S. Mill had already so mastered classics, philosophy, law, history, economics, science, and mathematics that when he applied to Cambridge University they turned him away because its professors didn't have anything more to teach him. Mill claimed, quite honestly, that he wasn't a particularly gifted child; it was simply that his father had a good system. His education was, in the apt phrase of Isaiah Berlin, "an appalling success."

Mill's education was centered on empowering him to become a great benefactor of humankind, someone capable of realizing Bentham's utilitarianism — of sweeping away premodern beliefs and bringing about the greatest good for the greatest number. Disciplines like philosophy and economics were supremely useful to this end. Religion and poetry, which struck James Mill as accumulations of old-fashioned ignorance and superstition, were not. As in Plato's Republic, the poets — those hot-and-bothered types who can't help celebrating love and tragedy — were exiled from Mill's education. (He did read the likes of Homer and Horace for historical context and grammar.) The one art encouraged was music, as it was sufficiently mathematical. In the fall of 1826, when J. S. Mill was twenty years old, he was, by his own admission, an erudite calculating machine whose emotional life was dead on the vine. The buttoned-up young Englishman had a nervous breakdown.

Mill wandered through his life, now devoted mostly to liberal journalism, with a giant emptiness clawing at him. When he turned for comfort to old friends on the library shelves, he found that even his favorite books of history and philosophy were without charm. He soldiered on with efforts for social reform, but his heart wasn't in it. It was as if he really had become a utilitarian machine, only one with a suicidal ghost inside. Even music worried him. Because the combination of notes isn't infinite, and because a tune's charm fades with familiarity, he was tormented by the thought that humanity would eventually grow bored of everything, even music.

From birth Mill had been raised for a single purpose in life: to realize Bentham's — and his father's — dream of reducing the pains and maximizing the pleasures of humanity. With his well-tuned calculative abilities, the twenty-year-old now put his finger right on the problem:

In this frame of mind it occurred to me to put the question directly to myself, "Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?" And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, "No!" At this my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down. ... I seemed to have nothing left to live for.

His spiritual and emotional life had been starved, and the goal of his existence no longer seemed worthwhile. But simply realizing that he needed to have feelings and zest didn't give him feelings and zest — any more than realizing you should learn a foreign language allows you to speak the foreign language.

After the dark winter of 1826–27, a near-suicidal Mill chanced on the memoirs of the historian Jean-François Marmontel and read the author's account of losing his father as a boy. Mill started crying, and the fact that he was crying filled him with a paradoxical happiness: "I was no longer hopeless: I was not a stock or a stone." The seeds of an emotional life were stirring. Next he explored the works of the great Romantic poets, particularly William Wordsworth, which further nourished the ecosystem of his inwardness. Life began to have zest again, although it took Mill several years to clamber all the way out of his depression. He realized that if his utilitarian dream of improving the lot of humankind were properly met, certain permanent good things would remain: natural beauty, our sympathy with others, tranquil recollections — the meat of Wordsworth's loveliest work. It's no exaggeration to say that poetry saved Mill's life.

Mill's problem, which is essentially the human problem, was that he was torn between happiness and meaning. We long for some ideal state where suffering is no more, where we would achieve an unalloyed happiness: Mill had been brought up to be able to make progress toward this end. The problem is that the state we wish for is humanly barren. It seems obvious to us moderns that we should simply alleviate suffering. If you have a headache, here's a pill. If you have a fatal disease, let's get you on the operating table. If our political system creates injustice, let's vote it out. That's utilitarianism in a nutshell. But this mindset, for all its wonderful no-nonsense helpfulness, leaves us without poetry — that is, without all the struggles and paradoxes that give life meaning and make it sing. As a pure product of modernity, Mill felt this dilemma like a kidney stone.

Mill's biography illustrates this deep conflict of our nature, and his philosophy is one of the noblest attempts to resolve it. If there has ever been a philosopher who convincingly argues that we should eliminate pointless suffering, it's J. S. Mill. And yet even his humane version of utilitarianism is widely considered to be, in the final analysis, unconvincing, despite the noble ideals that inspire it. Can the refined goals of philosophy be reconciled with the raw humanity of poetry? Is it possible for us to lead meaningful lives and die meaningful deaths without accepting and even embracing a certain ineradicable dimension of pointless suffering?

* * *

Throughout most of human history, the so-called problem of evil has been almost exclusively registered as the mystery of evil. The acceptance of suffering has been practically synonymous with faith, which reassures us that this mean old world isn't the end of the story: there's a huge invisible meaning pervading even our most painful or trivial moments if we learn to accept them and grow toward their supernatural promise.

Starting in the eighteenth century, the mystery of evil becomes the problem of evil. The fact of suffering turns into a clear-cut refutation ofGod to intellectuals like James Mill. As J. S. Mill says of his father, "He found it impossible to believe that a world so full of evil was the work of an Author combining infinite power with perfect goodness and righteousness." In fact, religion was, in his father's eyes, "the greatest enemy of morality: first, by setting up factitious excellencies, — belief in the creeds, devotional feelings, and ceremonies, not connected with the good of human kind, — and causing these to be accepted as substitutes for genuine virtues: but above all, by radically vitiating the standard of morals." To the James Mills of the world, the idea of worshiping a being that is the ultimate cause of suffering is not only absurd but undercuts the very purpose of morality. It channels energies toward the acceptance of what we should remedy. It makes us worship precisely what we should wish to overthrow.

A big part of the genius of Jeremy Bentham, the Mills' guru, is his ability to follow through on the logic that indicts God. Rather than wait in hope for supernatural justice, we should strive to minimize pain and maximize pleasure in the here and now, the only time we can be sure of having. This is what Bentham calls "the principle of utility" and what Mill often calls "the greatest happiness principle." Bentham isn't officially an atheist; he mostly seems content to talk of God as shorthand for the structuring principles of the universe. When he does analyze the idea of the divine, he comes down as an agnostic who thinks that it's of no real consequence whether we believe in God or not. Yet his philosophy is a powerful kind of atheism, for it's the rejection of the living substance of faith: the fundamental acceptance of suffering as part of the human journey.

Another way of putting the matter is that Bentham's philosophy radically changes our conception of nature. The traditional idea is that nature is a divine set of limits — inalterable physical and moral laws, like gravity, the fact of death, or the Golden Rule — that ultimately punish us when we try to flout them. For Bentham and Mill, nature is simply raw data that we're supposed to modify to humanly acceptable ends. Disease and death, for instance, aren't to be accepted as natural; they're to be combatted and, ideally, remedied. Moreover, there's no "natural law"— that is, no moral code — that governs us; we simply have desires that can be more or less met. On first discovering Bentham as a teenager, the initial excitement for J. S. Mill was precisely his explosion of the old concepts of nature: "phrases like 'law of nature,' 'right reason,' 'the moral sense,' 'natural rectitude,' and the like ... [amounted to] dogmatism in disguise. ... Here was the commencement of a new era in thought."

Mill defines nature as "the sum of all phenomena, together with the causes which produce them; including not only all that happens, but all that is capable of happening." Despite his fondness for the Romantics, Mill argues that to revere nature is both irrational and immoral: irrational, because the main point of human reason — think of tools or politics — is to make amends for nature's inability to satisfy us; immoral, because to model our life on what nature does — think of cancer or hurricanes — would be to turn ourselves into moral monsters. As Mill puts it:

In sober truth, nearly all the things which men are hanged or imprisoned for doing to one another, are nature's every day performances. Killing, the most criminal act recognized by human laws, Nature does once to every being that lives; and in a large proportion of cases, after protracted tortures such as only the greatest monsters whom we read of ever purposely inflicted on their living fellow-creatures.

Mill goes on to compare nature to history's cruelest dictators, only to conclude that the comparison is grossly unfair to the dictators.

"Utilitarianism" is a somewhat misleading term for the moral theory that derives from Bentham. What Bentham means by "utility" is not simply what's useful but what's specifically useful to the attainment of what he claims we all basically want: satisfaction. According to Bentham, pain and pleasure are our "two sovereign masters." The central idea of utilitarianism is that our sovereign masters should lead us not simply to increase our own pleasure and lessen our own pain but to bring about the greatest amount of satisfaction for everyone. We should aim at what is best. Since pleasure is good, more pleasure is better, and — Bentham reasons — the most pleasure is best. In Utilitarianism, J. S. Mill argues, more cogently than Bentham, that the greatest-good principle is the offspring of two impulses in us: the first, our desire for pleasure for ourselves; the second, our inborn moral impulse toward others. Put them together, and you get the idea that we ought to bring about pleasure not just for ourselves but for everyone we influence. If we need a better fancy name for utilitarianism, we could call it "ethical hedonism" or "moral voluptuism" — whatever Greek or Latin term means "maximum-satisfaction-for-everyone-ism."

In short, Bentham wants to put reason in charge of our fate so that life on earth can be improved for as many people as possible. Beginning in the 1790s, his ideas began to catch on — first in revolutionary France and then in reformist England. Some of Bentham's radical proposals slowly but surely came to be taken for granted across the modernizing world: economic freedom checked by a welfare state, equal opportunities for women, the ability to divorce, the separation of church and state, and the decriminalization of homosexuality.

* * *

Though J. S. Mill, a dutiful son, never rejects the utilitarianism of his father and his father's mentor, he makes such radical changes to it that it almost deserves a different name. Whether Mill's idiosyncratic version of utilitarianism holds together as a theory is much in doubt; nevertheless, I take Mill's interventions in Bentham's central ideas to be evidence of an impeccable philosophical character: he wrestles with the real paradoxes of being alive, even at the expense of theoretical ugliness.

The first big change is that Mill celebrates political freedom as the best way of bringing about the greatest good for the greatest number. In his masterpiece On Liberty (1859) Mill articulates the political principle that becomes second nature to modernity: "The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others." At first glance, the idea that we can do what we want provided it doesn't harm others seems like a lovely application of utilitarianism to the political realm. Oppression, subjugation, and slavery are all obvious sources of misery, for which a live-and-let-live system of rights seems like a perfect antidote.

But freedom, especially the kind of pervasive freedom celebrated by Mill in his masterpiece On Liberty, involves a certain nonutilitarian tolerance of suffering. Take the freedom of speech. On the one hand, as Mill forcefully argues, this freedom is compatible with the principle of utility insofar as it allows new and potentially helpful ideas to flourish and bad ideas to be challenged and corrected. On the other hand, as Mill conveniently ignores, it's easy to find scenarios in which the suppression of certain kinds of speech could be reasonably justified in the name of the greatest amount of satisfaction. The fear of terrorism leads some citizens to wish for the suppression of ugly jihadist propaganda, especially the kind of psychological manipulation terrorists employ on the internet. The fear of regressive political positions leads some students and professors to shut down certain forms of speech on campus. Could well-tailored laws that limit speech bring about the greatest happiness and the least misery for the greatest number? J. S. Mill doesn't recognize even the theoretical possibility that utilitarianism could be used to suppress the freedom of speech. "If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion," Mill says in an astounding statement of principle, "mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind." In short, Mill celebrates the value of freedom in ways that go beyond the greatest happiness for the greatest number; or, to put the matter differently, his concept of "the greatest good" involves values — like truth or freedom — that aren't reducible to maximal pleasure.

Consider that the Bill of Rights, our country's paean to freedom, is, roughly speaking, an inversion of the Ten Commandments. God tells us to worship only the true God; the Constitution tells us that we have a right to worship false gods. God tells us to speak the truth; the Constitution tells us that we have a right to speak falsely. God tells us that we shouldn't kill; the Constitution tells us that we have a right to bear arms. God tells us that we shouldn't commit adultery; the Constitution tells us that we have a right to privacy. God tells us not to bear false witness; the Constitution says that we don't have to incriminate ourselves. In other words, freedom gives us the ability to inflict the kind of evil that almost all moral systems — including Bentham's utilitarianism — try to eliminate. Why, if we want to eliminate suffering, should we celebrate liberty? Why, if we want to fight terrorism and reduce crime and minimize the damage we inflict on each other, should we stick to the Constitution? Wouldn't an enlightened despotism that helps us all to find satisfaction be preferable? Why, if we want to minimize suffering, should we put any trust at all in human freedom?